Essays for Overthinkers!

In colonial Brazil, the convergence of European imperialism with Indigenous and African cultures produced a distinct cultural and artistic landscape defined not solely by domination but also by resistance, adaptation, and hybridization. Through a close examination of mulatto artistic production—especially that of the iconic sculptor Aleijadinho—as well as syncretic religious objects and contemporary reinterpretations like Cyriaco Lopes’ Cão Mulato, this essay investigates the role of art in challenging racial and imperial structures. Central to this analysis are the concepts of ‘historicity’ and ‘achronicity’ as defined by Amy Buono, which frame the colonial Brazilian artistic experience as one simultaneously embedded in specific power dynamics and resistant to linear temporal narratives. Art in this context was not a passive reflection of colonial values, but an active agent in the reconfiguration of cultural identity—ultimately contributing to the emergence of a mulatto aesthetic that shaped Brazil’s national identity.

Historicity and Achronicity: Buono's Framework for Understanding Colonial Art

Amy Buono, in her article “Historicity, Achronicity, and the Materiality of Cultures in Colonial Brazil,” introduces the concept of “achronicity” to describe the complex temporality of colonial art created by oppressed peoples. Achronicity, as she describes it, refers to the resistance of objects to being situated within a linear historical framework. These objects defy a single cultural or temporal reading; they embody Indigenous and African temporalities that do not align with European Enlightenment concepts of progress and chronology. At the same time, “historicity”—the embeddedness of these objects within specific socio-political and material conditions—grounds them in the colonial realities of violence, domination, and negotiation (Buono).

By foregrounding both historicity and achronicity, Buono shows how colonial Brazilian art cannot be understood merely as derivative of European models or as timeless cultural residue. Instead, it is produced through and against colonial power structures. This double movement—of being in time and against time—renders these artworks as sites of resistance and cultural survival. For instance, she analyzes Indigenous featherwork and Christian liturgical objects reworked by Indigenous and African artisans, showing how such pieces retain non-European cosmologies even while formally adhering to imposed religious structures. This theoretical lens will serve as the foundation for exploring how mulatto art functions not merely as hybrid but as culturally generative—a space where resistance and synthesis co-produce new forms.

Aleijadinho and the Canonization of Mulatto Art
One of the most significant figures in Brazilian colonial art is Antônio Francisco Lisboa, widely known as Aleijadinho. Born in Ouro Preto to a Portuguese architect and an enslaved African woman, Aleijadinho occupies a liminal racial and social space that profoundly informed his artistic production. His sculptures and architectural designs—particularly the soapstone statues of the Twelve Prophets at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas—are emblematic of Brazil’s baroque aesthetic yet defy complete assimilation into European stylistic norms (Smith).

Scholars such as Germain Bazin have long canonized Aleijadinho’s work within the European baroque tradition, emphasizing its architectural symmetry and dramatic religious fervor (Bazin). However, this framing obscures the ways in which his art reflects a uniquely Brazilian sensibility rooted in his racial identity and colonial context. As Celso de Oliveira notes, while Aleijadinho’s work is deeply influenced by European techniques, it also bears a visceral intensity and material immediacy that diverge from the refined ornamentation of European baroque. His figures exhibit elongated proportions, exaggerated emotional expressions, and an almost mystical spirituality that reflect Afro-Brazilian religious sensibilities, even within Catholic frameworks (de Oliveira).

One of the most compelling aspects of Aleijadinho’s artistic practice is his choice of materials—especially his prolific use of soapstone (known locally as pedra-sabão), a soft metamorphic rock found in abundance in Minas Gerais. Soapstone was widely used in colonial Brazil not only for sculpture and architectural detailing but also in the making of cookware, particularly pots and pans used in domestic food preparation. This dual function of soapstone—as both a liturgical and domestic material—highlights an overlooked junction of European religious iconography with the everyday life of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous households (Frota). In choosing this material, Aleijadinho was not merely working with what was locally available; he was also investing religious art with the textures and associations of daily Brazilian life. The material’s tactility and heat-retaining properties made it an essential component of colonial domesticity, and its translation into religious figures inscribes those mundane associations into the sacred space (de Vasconcellos). In this sense, Aleijadinho’s sculptures do not simply depict saints—they are embodiments of the social and material realities of Brazil’s colonial interior, blurring the boundaries between the spiritual and the mundane, the European and the creole.

Aleijadinho’s ability to attain respect and recognition within a colonial society deeply stratified by race attests to the power of his artistic voice. As Tania Costa Tribe argues, mulatto artists in colonial Brazil were both products of and resistors to the racial order. They were often trained in European techniques through religious institutions or informal apprenticeships, but their social marginalization led them to forge unique artistic idioms (Tribe). In Aleijadinho’s case, this resulted in artworks that, while religious in subject matter, exude a spiritual expressiveness that transcends doctrinal boundaries. His sculptures do not merely represent biblical scenes but seem to channel a deeply affective form of spirituality tied to his own experience as a racialized and disabled subject.

Moreover, Aleijadinho’s own physical suffering—he developed a debilitating illness that left him physically impaired, now believed to be leprosy—has often been mythologized in Brazilian art history. This narrative of martyrdom aligns with a Christian valorization of suffering but also metaphorically mirrors the condition of the mulatto in colonial society: both excluded and indispensable, stigmatized and elevated. In this way, Aleijadinho’s life and work become emblematic of mulatto art as a form of cultural creation born out of contradiction and constraint. His work does not simply adapt European forms to Brazilian themes—it reinvents them through materiality, embodiment, and pain, forging a syncretic aesthetic deeply tied to Brazil’s colonial contradictions.

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Syncretic Religious Objects as Mulatto Artifacts
Following the discussion of Aleijadinho, it is crucial to consider the broader material culture of colonial Brazil—particularly religious objects that embody the fusion of Indigenous, African, and European elements. These syncretic artifacts, often produced by mulatto, Indigenous, or African artisans, challenge Eurocentric definitions of art and religion. Buono highlights several such objects in her analysis, such as Christian liturgical items adorned with Indigenous featherwork or carved using African symbolism. These hybrid forms reveal how oppressed artisans engaged with imposed religious frameworks not only as converts but as cultural innovators, or negotiators.
One compelling example is the use of featherwork in Christian processional standards and ecclesiastical vestments. While these items served Christian rituals, their materials and visual forms invoked Amerindian cosmologies of spiritual transformation and natural power. The feathers, traditionally used in ceremonial regalia, carried meanings that exceeded their Christian contexts. Thus, these objects were not mere appropriations by the Church; rather, they were reappropriations by Indigenous and mixed-race artisans who infused them with layered significances. In this way, these religious objects operate within the achronic temporalities Buono identifies: they participate in colonial liturgy while simultaneously invoking non-European spiritual frameworks.

Similarly, Afro-Brazilian artisans incorporated Yorùbá and Bantu motifs into Catholic iconography. Saints were often portrayed with physiognomic traits or attributes reminiscent of African or Indigenous deities. For instance, images of Saint Benedict the Moor—a Black saint canonized by the Catholic Church—were frequently localized through the use of African artistic idioms. These adaptations were not merely aesthetic; they served to localize spiritual authority within the lived experiences of the oppressed. By fashioning sacred objects that reflected their own cosmologies, mulatto and other racialized artisans transformed spaces of worship into zones of cultural persistence and innovation.

The infusion of African religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda into the cultural fabric of colonial and postcolonial Brazil represents a particularly powerful form of syncretism, one that extended even into white, upper-class households, especially in Bahia. As art historian Kim D. Butler notes, these religions did not merely survive under the pressures of Catholic hegemony—they transformed and hybridized, integrating Catholic saints with African orixás in ways that allowed for covert religious practice under colonial rule (Butler). Over time, this blending permeated the domestic and visual culture of Bahia’s white elite. Ceramic sculptures of saints were often reinterpreted or physically altered to resemble African deities, and religious altars in homes began to reflect this dual allegiance. This form of cultural creolization demonstrates how African-Brazilian religious aesthetics reshaped dominant visual codes, resulting in religious objects that can be considered mulatto in nature—both materially and spiritually. Even white Baianos, knowingly or unknowingly, participated in this process by incorporating Candomblé elements—such as beads, incense, and icons—into their home décor or domestic rituals, suggesting that African spirituality not only resisted erasure but subtly subverted racial hierarchies through its aesthetic influence (Harding). Such religious syncretism complicates binary distinctions between oppressor and oppressed, revealing how African-derived aesthetics infiltrated colonial power structures and became foundational to Brazilian identity.

Such religious artworks and practices also destabilized the European insistence on aesthetic purity and iconographic orthodoxy. They became vehicles for alternative epistemologies—ways of knowing and experiencing the divine that did not align with Enlightenment rationalism or Catholic dogma. As a result, these objects not only reflect the power structures of colonialism but also subtly resist and reconfigure them. They form what might be called an aesthetic of survival: a mode of art-making rooted in ambiguity, fusion, and subversion. In the context of this essay, these syncretic religious objects must be understood as central examples of mulatto art—cultural products that refuse assimilation while drawing from multiple lineages.

Contemporary Aplications: Cyriaco Lopes and the “Cão Mulato” Project
The themes explored in colonial mulatto art continue to reverberate in contemporary Brazilian artistic practice. One striking example is the Cão Mulato project by Cyriaco Lopes and Edson Barrus, which uses the metaphor of a hybrid dog breed to explore Brazilian racial identity and historical memory. As Lopes explains, the Cão Mulato represents the nation’s mestizo heritage—a lineage marked by forced mixture, ambiguity, and resistance (Lopes). The choice of metaphor is provocative and deeply intentional: throughout Brazilian history, the term mulatto itself carries zoomorphic and dehumanizing undertones. Etymologically derived from mula (mule), the word was used to describe the offspring of a horse and a donkey—an animal associated with sterility and non-normative hybridity. Applied to humans, mulatto evoked associations of animality and unnaturalness, becoming a key tool in the colonial racial taxonomy that sought to rank, discipline, and differentiate bodies (Sansone). This racial logic frequently likened mixed-race people to animals—not only as metaphor, but as a strategy of social marginalization and ontological denial.

By aligning mulattos with dogs, a creature historically viewed as both (forcibly) loyal and impure, the term ‘cão mulato’ amplifies this tension between subjugation and belonging. The Cão Mulato project confronts and reclaims this legacy of insult. In attempting to genetically engineer a new breed of dog as a living metaphor for Brazil’s racial hybridity, the artists appropriate the very logic of racial science and twist it into absurdity. Rather than passively accepting the zoomorphization of mulattos, the project transforms it into a grotesque performance—one that forces viewers to reckon with the constructed, violent, and ultimately unstable nature of racial classification (Lopes). The project critiques the historical manipulation of racial categories and calls attention to how mixed-race identities have been simultaneously celebrated as symbols of national harmony and erased through cultural whitening. By invoking the figure of the mulatto dog, the work critiques the ambivalence of Brazilian racial ideology while reclaiming the insult as a site of ironic empowerment and speculative identity.

Like Aleijadinho’s sculptural work or the syncretic religious objects discussed earlier, Cão Mulato refuses a singular interpretive frame; it engages with historical violence and contemporary inequality while also offering a playful, speculative vision of a decolonized future. The project’s performative and conceptual dimensions align with Amy Buono’s notion of achronicity: it disrupts linear narratives of racial progress and instead situates identity within a continuum of resistance, transformation, and reimagination. The notion of creating a new species—a dog breed that embodies Brazil’s complex, painful, yet beautiful racial genealogy—also gestures toward the possibility of breaking with inherited epistemologies altogether, offering an uncanny vision of biological and cultural synthesis beyond colonial logics.
Importantly, Cão Mulato foregrounds the materiality of race in Brazilian culture. By focusing on the body—of the dog, of the mulatto, of the artist—it makes visible the processes through which race has been constructed, disciplined, and commodified. In this way, it echoes the embodied spiritualities and affective intensities present in Aleijadinho’s sculptures or the hybrid liturgical objects of the colonial period. All these works—historical and contemporary—reveal how art serves not only to reflect identity but to invent and contest it. In reclaiming the metaphor of the dog, the Cão Mulato project insists that what was once used to degrade can now be turned into a site of cultural creation, subversion, and critical consciousness.

In Conclusion, A Mulatto Aesthetic of Resistance
Through the lens of historicity and achronicity, we can see that mulatto art in colonial and postcolonial Brazil is not a marginal or derivative phenomenon but a central mode of cultural production. From the baroque sculptures of Aleijadinho to feather-adorned chalices and Afro-Christian saints, and finally to the speculative hybridity of the “Cão Mulato,” Brazilian art bears witness to a long history of racial negotiation, resistance, and reinvention.

The mulatto artist, situated at the intersection of multiple identities and exclusions, becomes a powerful figure of aesthetic creation. By neither fully assimilating to European norms nor retreating into isolated traditions, mulatto art asserts a new cultural logic—one that values ambiguity, fusion, and embodied spirituality. In doing so, it challenges the racial and imperial logics that sought to erase its presence. It is not only art about survival; it is art as survival.

In the context of contemporary debates about race, empire, and universalism, these insights remain profoundly relevant. Brazilian mulatto art invites us to rethink the foundations of cultural value and artistic canons. It suggests that true universality is not achieved through erasure or assimilation but through the recognition of multiplicity, contradiction, and shared struggle. In this sense, the art of the oppressed in colonial Brazil does not merely add color to the margins of history—it redraws the contours of cultural identity itself.